An Unlikely Environmentalist Fights a Gold Mine Near Yellowstone

For nine years, Bryan Wells and his wife drew their drinking water from the clear flow of Emigrant Creek. A silver thread tumbling out of the Absaroka Mountains and through Wells's property in Montana’s Paradise Valley, Emigrant Creek joins the Yellowstone River, one of America’s most celebrated rivers. Together, these two waterways, one iconic, the other unknown, helped transform Wells, a conservative Trump voter, into a most unlikely environmental activist. Wells, 63, has a long, graying beard, callused hands, and a deep, slow, gravely voice that sounds like stone, like the way a mountain would speak. After working for the Burlington Northern Railroad as a teenager, he saved enough money to buy an old miner’s cabin and a patch of land near Emigrant Creek when he was 18. In the 1980s, the railroad shut down its service in Livingston, Montana, the nearest town of consequen...